Group joins service for war dead

FOR years Wayne Wetherall has enlightened Australians to the horrors inflicted on scores of our World War II Diggers in Papua New Guinea by taking groups along the infamous Kokoda Track.

Now he is determined to shed more light on another atrocity committed against our Diggers by introducing Australians to the story of the Sandakan POW camp and related death marches.

It is one of Australia’s most tragic World War II episodes – a largely unknown snapshot of Japan’s wartime inhumanity on the island of Borneo which led to the deaths of more than 2000 Australian and British soldiers.

Of the 1787 Australian and 642 British soldiers incarcerated at the Sandakan POW camp, only six Diggers survived the three 260km death marches from Sandakan to the Ranau POW camp on the island.

To commemorate the 65th anniversary of the death marches, a special memorial service will be held in Sandakan on Sunday.

Mr Wetherall, the managing director of Sippy Downs-based Wild Spirit and Kokoda Spirit, will be there with a group of nine Australians.

He will lead the group, which includes three Sunshine Coast residents, along the last 140km of the route and across the mountains.

It will be only the second official group that he has taken along the route.

“It really has been one of those tragedies that has been suppressed for so long, and the story only came out in 2006 as to what an awful tragedy this was,” Mr Wetherall said.

Retired police senior sergeant Julie Elliott will be joined on the journey by two other Coast residents, 92.7 MIX FM announcer Mark Darin and Wendy Grieve.

Ms Elliott said: “When I started to hear about Sandakan, I was stunned as to how little I knew and jumped at the chance to learn a bit more.”